December 2009

December 31, 2009

I wrote the following brief letter to a cousin, I imagine, somewhere around late 1992-93 when I still danced to Janet Jackson but had not yet learned to be entrepreneurial quite well enough. I assumed at the time that making money in America was a lot less involved with laws, ethics and morals than it is. But I assumed a lot of things in the early 90s. To wit:

These days, cousin, I am not at Xerox. One can only be masochistic for so long. Xerox self immolated in the workstation business. It was too much for my poor heart to bear. I couldn't stand Sun's arrogance and plus they wouldn't hire me, so I went to Pilot Software. I've been there since 90 building business information systems with thier proprietary multi-platform software. When we go public, I expect to make a small pile and open up a VAR. On the other hand I just might go live in Mexico and raise pigs or the Outback and play cowboy or Central America and help build Belize. It depends on fate.

As a writer, I exercise my privilege of literacy and my responsibility as a moral and critical thinker. I am hoping that digitization movement moves far and quick enough so that I don't have to order books by mail if and when I finally decide to blow this joint. It could lock me forever in a large metro. I find that prospect ugly. But moreover I have been encouraged by a writer named A. Sivanandan who is a Tamil to be a model in this country. He tells us that blacks and others in this country serve as great inspiration to peoples of developing nations who fear the McDonaldization of their traditions. Educated people in the Third World are scared to death not of Colin Powell and Dick Cheney but of Disney and NBC. They take heart when they see emerging blacks and latinos retain their own culture yet comfortably appropriate the gifts of modernity. But this is not, as you know, simple minded rebellion, but a constant creative process. Culture is not static. People must move it as times change. It's a daunting task to become a cultural worker and produce worthwhile artifacts of African American cultural experience, but sometimes I feel up to it. Especially when I can quell falsehoods about the 'hoods, I feel that I am contributing to a faithful rendition of my country in real time. Part of the task is easy, and that is just remaining true to myself and expressing my own flavor derived as it is from the real cultural traditions of my people.

Exercising privilege? Well you could see that I was deeply multicultural at the time.

Digitization movement. These days are a good time to look back at Negroponte's predictions. The digitization movement is nearly complete, awaiting as it does, a decent legal framework on literature as Google and Apple are likely to work out with Amazon or independently.

But my aim was to get out of big American cities. Having just moved out of New York to Boston, I found Boston to be too provincial - having no way to enjoy that for what it was and is, primarily because of my provocative cultural producer's angle.

The constant creative process was an overripe assumption as well. Instead, I had no idea how small-minded and self-absorbed multicultural cultural production was. It was and is a constant stabbing of a cultural stereotype in the back with a constant gripe that refused to be accommodated. In the end, I think all the multiculturalists truly desire is a well-documented cultural alignment with some primatives overrun by DWEMs with a kind of ahistorical privilege... ick. I'm even using wack terms to describe my own old wackness.

Culture is indeed not static, but the aims of multiculturalism are, which is why ultimately it requires a kind of cultural essentialism, an inviolate dogma. Of course, it needn't be consistent as an insurgent 'philosophy'. It is cultural terrorism. There are practically infinite ways to rebel but only a few good ways to lead. And understanding that multicultural insurgency would never lead fuels its permanent aspect in the US.

'My people' had to eventually broaden because there is no clique of black leadership which is self-sustaining. Nor of cultural leadership. Pshaw. But I still should try to party with Wynton...

kukla: slavery is the fact of life in our christian nation and the black man suffers for it. yet the bible tells us that for the curse of ham, this is his destiny. the best we can do through christian charity is to bring him succor and pity his fate, but it is ordained of god that he should suffer this way. slavery brings wealth to the nation and we are stained by the shame of it, but such is our imperfection before god. we are forgiven.

fran: slavery is indeed shameful but defensible because the nation profits from slavery, and the slaves themselves cannot stand in the way of national progress. i should rather see them free but the social reality is that we cannot agree what else is to be done with them. if the people could only be convinced slavery is wrong i could use my iron works in troy n.y. for something more profitable than manacles - railroads and western expansion. would that slaves could be set free and sent west! but this is impossible and so i stand behind slavery as it stands.

ollie: indeed! christ himself was a black man and he teaches us to love all as equals. christian charity should rescue them from slavery and set them as equals before god and man, no matter what cost to the nation. this commandment supercedes any old testament curse of ham. we are not forgiven this vile tresspass against god's creation.

fran: i know nothing of this 'ham' nor his curse and am not inclined to believe it anyhow. yet if what ollie says is true, then perhaps your version christian charity is flawed and inconsistent, kukla. i should fund a study of the history of those peoples and see if christ was wooly headed after all. if it could be proven, we could change the nation, and i could break my contracts, thus joining the railroads.

kukla: what do you know of christian charity? mind you the law of the land, fran. ollie is a heretic and a radical who seeks to justify overthrow of the south. why he even supports the work of osama turner!

fran: is this true, ollie? if it is, then i must side with kukla, who at least stands correct in that osama is a murderer of the first order. i could not condone any such support. slavery is legal, and profitable for me. murder clearly is not.

ollie: no. i abhor his violence, nevertheless his aim is proper - the south must come under new order, and god wills it that all should speak up against slavery for the moral reasons i have given here. the curse of ham is false. the truth is that the black african's soul weighs as much as any white man's.

kukla: the south follows the will of god, slavery shall remain, the black man's accursed soul is born best by those who employ it now as they do for the wealth of the nation, and the greater glory of god. furthermore you have no right to speak on what course christians should follow as they regard the souls of the african. your research would be of no conseqence to true christians.

fran: perhaps not, yet i do agree that the african is at least more our equal than the perpetual slave our laws keep him. i am intrigued that if this christ of yours himself was a black man, i would be convinced that ollie would be more correct in principle. yet i know nothing of weighing souls. i daresay that my am more inclined to reverse my position, were it is possible to discover..

ollie: oh but it is! the blood on the shroud of turin is african. and a man of your stature could endeavor to prove it. i should gladly provide you with introductions to do so, kind sir, if you would provide the means.

kukla: it doesn't matter what the shroud says, it matters what the bible says. the black man's soul is cursed, slavery remains, end of discussion, you bloody heretic. what care you of the christian order of things?

ollie: the shroud is the perfect relic to prove the black man's soul is equal. what care you of the greater glory of god you sniveling hypocrite.

kukla: usurper!

ollie: blasphemer!

fran: gentlemen, gentlemen! there remains much yet to be determined. i must say i am entirely put off by the tone of your discussion. i daresay i should leave well enough alone, what with all this soul weighing, blood tests and ancient curses. i shall profit either way the law of the land goes. and while i am inclined to enter a vigorous debate about this policy i'm afraid to belong to either of your contingents. therefore i cannot take council from either of you in these terms.

kukla: ..and recuse yourself from moral debate hiding hither behind your till? you make a mockery of the political process, and care not a whit for the enduring values of god. mark me, i shall be heard. for none has known the deprivations of the darkling more than i in my own ministrations to them. they see the word of god and take it unto their bosoms as no learned man such as yourself could possibly fathom. they are innocents and due to their own nature and that of their harsh toil here see comfort in christian charity that knows no precedent. even i am moved by their tender faith and obedient supplication in prayer.

ollie: oh spare me this ramble. are you so blind that you cannot see their very example proves their souls full equal? i needn't tarry with them continually to know their measure. and it is full measure for the word of god applies to them as surely and as truly as it applies to you and i. god created man in his image and we all have eyes to see the african is man, flesh and blood as are we. he labors because he is a slave, but would he not equally rule and think if he were raised to do so under some other circumstances? none of us, as we are born, know of god but through our study. and some come to salvation at such late dates in their lives but steal heaven in redemption. what application of man is greater than that of faith? the slave set free could be reclaimed just as any soul.

fran: good fellows you have moved me from confusion to anger to compassion. i can see it is in your wills to do right by your faith on this matter of our mutual concern. but i cannot probe the depths of your reasoning, for i do not see souls or the will of god in this matter at all. it is entirely a practical matter of power and law as expressed through the will of the people. and only by hearing you at length show me the error of presuming to entreat you by working through your symbols. i apologize and recant any notion of convincing christians. so humor me in putting your faiths aside for a moment to consider the law, for i must now move from compassion to clarity.

--

I wrote this probably around 1999, long before I tired of the moral debate around racism. I could see how Christian ethics were at odds and the law and commerce was looking for a moral figleaf from one hand or the other.

For reference. I was checking Overcoming Bias to see if it had any synergies with Taleb and found it was fairly quiet except for some early skepticism which didn't seem well founded. One of the more sensible sounding commenters pointed to Stan Liebowitz. I thought I had this idea somewhere else on Cobb, and I do, but Liebowitz isn't keyed to it. It was Wallison from the AEI. I'm changing that now. Here's Liebowitz in Feb of 2008.

Ironically, an enthusiastic Fannie Mae Foundation report singled out one paragon of nondiscriminatory lending, which worked with community activists and followed “the most flexible underwriting criteria permitted.” That lender’s $1 billion commitment to low-income loans in 1992 had grown to $80 billion by 1999 and $600 billion by early 2003.

Who was that virtuous lender? Why—Countrywide, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, recently in the headlines as it hurtled toward bankruptcy.

In an earlier newspaper story extolling the virtues of relaxed underwriting standards, Countrywide’s chief executive bragged that, to approve minority applications that would otherwise be rejected “lenders have had to stretch the rules a bit.” He’s not bragging now.

The word out there is that Rush Limbaugh has been hospitalized with chest pains. I only know this is so because the Multi Cult is running naked around the Mother Tree whooping it up, voodoo dolls and stickpins in hand.

I can't seem to keep it out of my head to dis these peasants despite the damage it might do to my own calm resolve, but they do bring it on themselves.

LOL...As bad as it may sound some people you just wish would have chest pains just to know that they will be quiet for at least a moment....but we talking about Rush...Wonder if any of his care takers are black??? LOL

I hope Rush Limbaugh is saved by a black lesbian doctor with a questionable immigration status

^^yeah..my sentiments also.

I felt bad for a second for hoping 2009 would claim one last celebrity.

I wish him the worst pain known to man. Yeah, I said it.

But we need people like Rush Limpdog to shine a light on what fools the far right is all about...

Wow! I know he is not a cool dude but to wish death and pain?

Too much hot air. Must be giving him gas pains.

Yep. I wish him the worst, as he wishes blacks, Latinos and Asians the worst each and every day.

I know. Demagogues like Rush do generations worth of damage by justifying racism as entertainment. So yeah, I'm pumping him full of oxy...

Or to quote the great philosopher Rasheed Wallace: Ball Don't Lie.

Michael David Cobb Bowen Hmm. Does politics make people say evil hurtful things? No, just fat white men, not any of you graceful thoughtful multi-x persons.

I would suspect it might be a heart attack, except since it's Rush, we all know he doesn't possess a heart! And let's face it - if Rush wasn't around to spew right wing nonsense, there are plenty others (Bill O'Reilly, Glen Beck, etc.) standing in line to fill the void.

My voodoo dolls can take them out one by one.

Sweet! :-)

He is a pain in the a$$, but to celebrate this agony and possible death brings you down to his level. I know you don't want to be compared to that ignorant SOB.

Just in case, you know, he dies.

--

I'm going to take a tangent here because I was thinking at length a bit yesterday about how it is that some level of commentary is kept alive. Well, now that I think about it, I'll pass. Talk is cheap, that's why.

Today's blog entry is brought to you by prayer and thanksgiving, and a lot of things I'm unable to focus on because of my illness. Oh yeah, I'm sick. Not sick as a dog, nor sick as a puppy. Sick as a coughing King who doesn't have to get up out of bed.

So I got this from the Spousal Unit two days ago, and she got it from somebody out east of here when we moved my sister from the San Gabriel Valley to the South Bay. When I saw her with it and she waved me off kissing her neck, I was persistent. And yet there were moments when I saw her as an old woman. This bug I now have drained her energy and made her hack like an old crone. It hobbled her and now it's got me by the throat.

There's something about being ill without knowing what the cause is that makes us think differently. And once again I think of how idiotic it is to watch television. You recall the old Ny-Quil commercials. They called it the sneezy snuff puffy achy something, using all the adjectives that a five year old would. Ahh povricito... We understand. No they don't. Nobody understands but you, and then you only understand if you know your own body.

If you're an athlete, you know pain and you know how much you can take. The same counts for warriors. (Ouch, now it really hurts to cough.) You can tell how long it's going to take you to run full speed again as you test your leg for the pain. Now that I officially know that my right kneecap is broken, I could tell how many more trips up and down sister's stairs I could do to and from the moving van. But I still don't know precisely when I broke it or how. I remember the day I ran seven miles on concrete - it was the last day I ever ran that far, and three miles out I could feel the pain coming, and I was overjoyed to destroy my knee on that day for the triumph of facing the pain. But I didn't know that my knee was broken, I just knew the inside was scraping bone and I would have to take up cycling from then on.

Then after a couple years of beach volleyball and 50 mile cycling weeks, especially on hills, I had pulled my kneecaps off center from overdeveloping my quads. Many of my friends had already had their arthroscopic surgery - the true mark of a weekend warrior. I only destroyed myself in moderation. I didn't care about winning in leisure sports so very much - I can remember the look in the eyes of one of my pickup vball teammates. He was angry. I think he condescended to play with me because he guessed I would hate to lose to those Manhattan Beach Aryans as much as he did. You don't get to see Asians curse that much, but this guy was turning a kind of tan, yellow, red with a heat of disgust I've never seen since. I'm not Phil Jackson. I like to win, I prefer to win, I want to win, but I don't need to win. Deep within me is a happy solopsist. He should have been happy just to see me playing a team sport. Why should I bust my ass for that?

I know how much pain I can take and how long it's going to be before I lose the desire to try. Yoda, him say do or do not there is no try. Yoda is a green moron who is 800 years old and still speaks pidgin English. He belongs on Dagoba. I try, just for the curiosity of tempting fate. I don't need to do or not do and say ahead of time what my sacred honor depends on. That's for foot soldiers, and in the immortal words of Danny Glover, I'm just too old for that shit.

When I'm ready to die, I won't care about trying. I won't conquer my own misgivings or do anything for anybody else's sake. With any luck I'll be able to know that's what I (won't) be doing. Still, I don't intend to get hit by a truck, I intend to cough my way out of this world in my own bed with the curtains drawn around my canopy, and maybe with some Nyquil and caviar on a silver tray. But that's fifty years away by my reckoning, or at least thirty eight. Plenty of time to get sick, drag my ass out of bed and type into the ether in more or less good spirits.

So right now I've got this nasty cough along with a headache. I have no chills and the aches I have are the same aches you get from moving furniture with a bum knee and no jacuzzi after a week. I slept better last night than the night before but the 30% wet cough burns the center of my chest if I let it go hard. So I'm pulling my coughs and tasting the light phlegm. I need a little Southern Comfort and soup. Miso if I can get some.

December 27, 2009

There's something about a song that can take you back in time and raise emotions and thoughts of days gone by. Today I stumbled across Chic's instrumental genius track 'Open Up'. From the Real People album,Chic became instantly my idols. I was a 'hood kid with a huge attraction to Chic. They were everything I was trying to be, stylistically. They manifest the funk with impeccable style. They were upbeat, posh and romantic. They were uppercrusty and seditty without being stuckup and conceited.

Last week, I gave an interview to Radio Montreal and there was something I wanted to convey about what I see as the estrangement between the generations of African Americans by class. I hate to say so, but I don't think that the current young generation has come anywhere near replicating the excellence of ours. Not as blacks at any rate.

Some time ago, I played to role of 'the last real black man' and did some scoffing about how our generation had real black culture and that which passes for 'black culture' today is dysfunctional, retrograde and ugly. It has been crossing my mind lately - more often than I'd like. I have this distinct notion that if Denzel Washington as he was when he made 'The Mighty Quinn' and 'Carbon Copy' tried to break into Hollywood, there would be no place for him. In today's entertainment industry, Sidney Poitier would be broke. In today's music business, a group like Chic, who would dare wear suits and long dresses and play upbeat dance music with a string section and without salacious lyrics would be laughed out of the studio.

Look at that album cover. What do you see? I see ladies and gentlemen. I see clams on the half shell, a little jive and jitterbug. I see people who say let's put an end to this stress and strife. They simply don't make 'em like they used to. Looking at today's culture, it's hard to believe that these were real people.

December 25, 2009

Several thoughtful readers have commented and egged me on to comment about the new law of the land which has something to do with Obama, health insurance and Congress. But I have been enjoying the spirit of the season and the love of family and friends.

I suspect that while I was listening to Straight No Chaser's acapella versions of some of my favorite Christmas carols, and while you were doing similar things, Congress slunk through the night to do their dirty business. I haven't been paying attention. My apologies to you vigilant people.

But perhaps before I shave and return to Cleveland and my appointed duties, I will weigh in on this new policy keeping in mind what you have told me.

I wonder if all of the analysis of Cameron's Avatar is stuck on the White Privilege meme. There's at least one writer who has dealt with the culture clash from another perspective. But it's clear to me that Cameron has some unfinished criticism of America or humanity that needs more exposition.

I find that once one has it in for the dominant culture, its flaws become permanent as do the virtues of all of its victims no matter how great or slight. So Cameron is stuck in that sophomoric muck. Or maybe just his critics are. Since I have already said that Avatar is not sufficiently literate to sustain a cogent critique of America or the West or humanity, despite its attempt, I'll go ahead and talk about what I see as left out. That is to say, here are some things that I think would have to be made explicit if we were to take Avatar's thrust more seriously.

First of all there is the fundamental conflict of the Terran (can we assume that this corporation represents humans or is it just a rogue operation?) economy and the rights of the Navi to self-determination. Can we assume that?

What we don't know is the basis upon which the mining company has established its permission to get mineral rights on Pandora. The company must have either discovered Pandora on its own, or have some tacit approval to acquire the materials. Might it have gotten this from the world around which Pandora orbits? Could the Na'vi we see be some persecuted minority of the Na'vi we don't see? What we do know is that the company does not have a military escort. Its security provision is all from ex-military. They're mercenaries, contractors. Not representing any Terran government. It is therefore, no matter what we extrapolate, a mission which could stand apart from human morals and law. It's only a racial clash if you want it to be.

cameron will never show the flaws of the navi because he has already engineered them to be everything he believes human culture cannot be or once was and lost, which is tribal and connected to ancestry.

one of the big holes in the flick which my son recognized was how easy it was for the humans to beat up the navi. so did the navi have warriors or not? - did they suddenly turn their hunting skills into war tactics?

the navi clans. were they federated? if not, what was the history of the navi individual who mastered the great dragon? why would the navi do so and what kind of authority is that? it's all rather neatly mysterious and ahistorical, and i think it serves the purpose of cameron which is to suggest that the navi are completely pacifist to the point of apologizing to their meat.

but if the navi are territorial, which they clearly are, rather than nomadic, like perhaps the horse clans are, then it's likely that they have had wars with other clans or outcasts. if that was *the* big tree, then there had to be pretenders to its throne.

now it's possible, but never mentioned, that the navi are incapable of that much reproduction, and on a moon that size might have never overpopulated anything or had any such tests of their tribal culture that required them to handle the complexities of cultural dissonance or economics.

something that would have been more interesting, hinted at in the matrix, was that human obsession with sexual reproduction makes humanity a literal plague. this would have been a useful and direct parallel to america's conquering of the west - the simple fact of the matter was that millions wanted in and the only kind of system that could govern millions was something beyond tribalism. both systems cannot be in place as the law of the land.

my point is that beyond the rhetorical question of the authority of the dragon lord, it is obvious that there had been previous calls to war by the possessor of that arthurian sword before, and the law and culture of the navi was to respond to the rallying war cry of whomever tamed the dragon. that was as deep in their dna as anything else in their culture for which they readily sacrificed themselves to battle.

I don't mean to suggest that there is something out of proportion to justice going on here, simply that the Na'vi share with humans respect for the warrior code, and that making war on the Na'vi for territory is a shared value. Nothing quite illustrates this than the scene in which the privilege to speak to the tribe is won by single combat with the tribe's senior warrior.

For his entertainment to be entertaining, the Na'vi cannot be so alien, and they are not.

December 24, 2009

Shut the hell up in the movie theater is about all that's left of etiquette in American society isn't it?

I picked up my copy of Emily Post's Green Book this morning and read a couple chapters, one on moving to a new town and another on restaurants to my youngest daughter. I seem to recall that when I purchased this book many years ago, I expected to find something of tangible value. Now it reads rather like an old history book - or a screenplay featuring Grace Kelly.

It also happens that just the other night I found myself rewatching, with my other daughter, Peter O'Toole in 'The Last Emperor'. As I watched, I considered my own attraction to O'Toole's formality in the role of a tutor to the Emperor of China, and remarked at length about the scene in which the royals played tennis in the Forbidden City. Once upon a time, John McEnroe seemed rude. But he seems incapable of shocking anyone today.

What have we done?

My Conservatism was born out of a recognition of many things, but one of them was that there are certain ways of behaving at work that are ultimately treacherous, and this sort of behavior should not be acceptable. The lesson I learned in 2003 was that an enemy is someone who doesn't mind if you fail. It probably was not always the case, but in today's lack of social standards, there is a sort of resignation coupled with populist backstabbing that allows what is bad to become worse. It isn't something I have thought about a great deal lately, and I think that I damned well better. I fear that my own frog is boiling.

I read 'Bobos in Paradise' by David Brooks several years ago to find that there is great atrophy in America's upper classes. Further, I found much to my consternation a confirmation of this from another angle in my recent reading of 'Richistan'. I think about PJ O'Rourke giving up in a rather cynical way years ago in his 'Modern Manners' and 'Parliament of Whores'. Sometimes I wonder if I might be one of the twenty people who is actually concerned about this. I'm sure that one of those concerned is Stephen L. Carter as he has written extensively on various ethical subjects in his 'Civility' and 'Integrity', laying somewhere on my shelves. But out there in American society, it's often difficult to find out where all that civilized rubber meets the road. We are deluged in depravity.

The worst aspect is that there seems to be little relief from it. I honestly do not know, and have never managed to locate much civilized company on a regular basis. I don't mean to suggest that the people whose company I share is not civilized, but that there is little continuity in it. As I travel, I haven't got the comfort of an office, regular bar mates or many of the comforts of a civil society. I'm certainly to blame as much as the next fellow - surely many of my avocations cannot be considered civilized pursuits, but at least I maintain or strive to at least, some modicum of composure and propriety. I am one of those people who believes there is a difference between right and wrong. Moreover I have the audacity to suggest that there is also better and worse and that every day everyone has a choice and *ought* to discipline themselves towards the better. It makes me rare, and I have perhaps unconsciously resigned myself to exasperation.

You see the last thing I want to become is that grouchy old man. But I have been that so often here at Cobb that I think people expect me to be some sort of fanatic without a life. But I am far from that; I am not religious in my ethics nor am I generally unhappy. I am genuinely happy in my life, wanting only to do more of that which I already do, wishing only for the Dosh to fund it and accommodating myself to the winning and losing possibilities. And yet in withdrawing as I have from much of my political debate I think I have come upon a kind of defensiveness.

I have found some likemindedness politically on the Right and some part of my piety in that direction as well. But I think that I'm a bit astray in society and I find myself attempting to negotiate myself into social areas that are perhaps so rare as to be practically non-existent, except perhaps in some wealthy areas of Texas. I mean that with no sarcasm. I think this is the leg of my life that I've been forgetting to control and observe. And perhaps it is not the Art History task that is so relevant, nor even my hesitant yet persistent desire to establish myself within the Catholic Church. Rather it is that I am deeply offended by the lack of social propriety in America, I am weirded out by its ethics, and that is what is most unresolved.

It is that combination I am lacking and I should gear myself up for addressing it.

December 23, 2009

Primer is a flick I found on Netflix last night. It is a babblefest kind of oxford shirt wearing movie - Pi meets Good Will Hunting. It's very intelligent, rather like Plano TX is intelligent. It is emotionally spartan except for the emotion of stress, and it has a kind of odd energy to it, like its characters, starting with four and stripped down to two of a friendship/partnership/co-conspiratorship. Somewhere in Primer is a great story, but it got mangled in the telling, and so it is a film to own and watch four times until you figure out the timeline. But you can't and you won't. Which is exactly the cool point.

What if you invented a time machine that could take you back? An hour, a day. What if you could do it? How do you work your way out of your life? If you're the kind of engineering entrepreneurial bootstrapper who is young a co-dependent on your engineering colleagues living on the verge of suburban stability just above the reaches of semi-loser friendships, then you are in the kind of claustrophobic reality of Primer. And in that regard there is no escape, only betrayal.

But how does the betrayal unravel? What about time paradoxes? Well the first thing about secret time travel is that it takes time. To run a 24 hour day in which you revisit 8 hours takes at least 36 hours. And you have to spend 8 of those hours away from yourself locked away so you can't re-influence what you're doing the second time around. You can pull it off for a while but then an emergency happens - the kind of thing you wish you had a time machine for in the first place, and then the emergency takes on a life of its own which you can't really control and Groundhog Day becomes a nightmare because you have a partner and your partner is your friend and the two of you can't keep a secret from each other which is that one of you is trying to save the other's life.

Get it? Of course you don't, and neither do I. The exposition in a time travel movie is very difficult especially one like this in which there is nested time travel. But if you could, imagine this. You and I decide to get rich in the stock market by day trading a day we've already experienced. OK. So we both go into our time travel machines and live from the notes we took the prior day we do the trading, and we get rich. But what if, unbeknownst to you, I've already done this time travel twice, so my doing the get rich thing is the second time. I'm just playing you because I know that in your altered future, somebody is trying to kill you because you're rich. And so now I have to time travel twice to change something that we've already changed and pretend that I'm only traveling the first time. But the entire thing is so mind-blowing and stressful that it's making me physically ill. Plus there are all the unknowables, plus chaos.

That's the core that makes the story compelling, but there's no way to expose and express all that well without talking to the camera, and nobody talks to the camera in Primer. In fact, the clipped and interrupted way that people like these engineers talk to each other is part of the chaos of the film.

Anyway. If you have ever been a young engineer, or entrepreneur, then this is a film you must see. It's an excellent thought exercise in causality and credulity, but as a movie, it hurts to watch if you only intend to watch it once.

December 22, 2009

I knew what I would like and what I wouldn't like about James Cameron's Avatar before I saw it. Everything about what Cameron said about this being a movie that came to him half a lifetime ago is true. The problem is we've heard that story a thousand times.

Everybody is an archtype, which makes this a movie for the ages and a retelling and a retelling. The only way to love this movie is to fall in love with the voice. Instead it is merely entertaining. It's hard to explain why archtypical storytelling worked so well in Spiderman and failed so awfully in Avatar. Maybe it's because (and I'm going to say what a thousand other critics will say) this story is so damned much like Pocahontas that you'd think somebody would sue. It doesn't make me hate the movie, it just makes it clear that Cameron is larger than life and nobody can tell him to grow up and make a film for sophisticates.

Just the other night I watched The Abyss and the whole stereotypical shebang fell on my head like a ton of daisy cutter explosives dropped out of a cargo plane. Cameron clearly has no time for any military intelligence, only warriors. So this time he made them a paramilitary bunch of mercs - he said it right out front. They're all in it for the ducats. And, as he did with The Abyss and Aliens, he has a narrow shouldered corporate puke calling the shots. At least this one's not passive-aggressive. In fact nobody in Avatar has any time of second thought. The whole damned thing is too epic, almost three hours. No wonder nobody had anything nuanced to say. Even the scientists were blinkered.

All that said, hey I'm an old man. I've heard all the jokes before. What I've never seen and what I never expected to see is this much compute power so effortlessly and seamlessly woven together into a live action film. Several years ago, people thought that computer animation would change the entertainment industry as virtual actors would replace real ones. But here's the news, the story may be a rehash but Cameron's technology is a revolution. I'll say it plainly:

James Cameron has destroyed the uncanny valley.

It is as if it never existed. It has taken one generation of filmmaking, but that old tagline from the Superman movie: "You'll believe a man can fly", has been taken to the virtual limit. And he did it without orcs.

December 19, 2009

Little Wing is my all time favorite guitar song. I just discovered Montgomery yesterday and I am astounded to hear it this way. His virtuosity is a kind of precocious thing that gives you an idea how extraordinarily quick his musical mind is thinking. I'm just going to sit around this morning listening to YouTubes of Little Wing...

i used to dream militantdreams of takingover america to showthese white folks how it should bedonei used to dream radical dreamsof blowing everyone away with my perceptive powersof correct analysisi even used to think i'd be the oneto stop the riot and negotiate the peacethen i awoke and dugthat if i dreamed natural dreams of being a naturalwoman doing what a woman does when she's naturali would have a revolution---

That's Nikki Giovanni. And for all the non-liberated negroes of the world, the message is simple. As long as you are a Negro, your life will be pain and suffering under the intentional and unintentional slings and arrows of people no more powerful than drunk suburban adolescents. Because they are They and you are Other, and you cannot think your way out of that bag. Pity. Pity. Pity.

Maybe that's why you're still unloved.

I wonder with doubt if the peasant generation of negroes, without the benefit of literacy, will ever achieve beyond this self-pity they call 'sensitivity'. It's the ignorance of the echo chamber - you know. Only babysitters respond to baby whining, and babysitters are paid to *mind* you. So crawl out the back door and learn to walk.

Stand up. Run. Run away from that little old hovel you complain about being a hovel. Get fledging. Drop to the forest floor and work them winglets. You may not grow up to be a raptor, but at least you could fly. Do you believe you can fly? Do you believe you can touch the sky? Then think about it every night and day until you can spread your wings and fly away.

Accenture put all of its marketing eggs into Tiger Wood's basket, and now the most sainted figure in the world of professional sports has destroyed, perhaps forever, the idea of sainted figures in professional sports.

I have to think back to recall if any of the sports heroes of mine actually ever finally screwed the pooch. For some reason I think they all did, except for those who are dead. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? Muhammad Ali? (Hmm, muslims) Steve Garvey? Thurman Munson? Gene Washington? Sugar Ray Leonard?

None of it is greatness. There is too much that we expect from sports as a consequence of too many of us having too much disposable income. So we shouldn't be so surprised that we have disposable heroes. What is golf, baseball, boxing? They are bourgeois entertainments, and it stands to reason that simply because millions of people pay a bit of attention and money that their creations should be lasting. Yankee stadium isn't the house that Ruth built, it is the house that the fans of Ruth built. Fan is short for fanatic. Why should we be surprised that the realization of fanatic dreams are ultimately dysfunctional?

So the world of golf finds itself shorn of its glamor and questioning its future. In the end it was all about Tiger Woods, not the game. The game? A splendid waste of time and space, if not energy. An exercise in frustration with few rivals in any organized activity. A tedious ritual of tournaments and jackets that could only be made exciting by someone possessed of a perfect combination of skill, intrigue and personality. Golf was born for the thing that Tiger Woods became and he wore it out. The story of golf one month ago was "How long is it going to take for us to declare Tiger Woods the greatest in history?" A whole quarter of its audience cared little more than to be a part of that history in the making. By watching.

And now they don't watch.

That only goes to prove that the power of celebrity is a significant part of American life. We might hope that 25% is as much as it goes but it might be more. The number of significant figures any average Joe might know in any field of public endeavor almost never exceeds a busload. And thus the entire consciousness of average Americans are almost never more than a car bomb away from total destruction. If you managed to got Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh in one plunging elevator of doom, half of America would have nothing to talk about.

It is that precariousness of our society that weakens it so. So much is so leveraged on singular winning expressions. I listened yesterday to a financial analyst talk about the tender offer for XTO's acquisition, and then he spoke of how it might happen again with "the Anadarkos, Devons and Chesapeakes of the world". It immediately became evident that he had exhausted that entire tier of the energy business. There aren't "Anadarkos, Devons and Chesapeakes of the world", that essentially is the world. We may as well be talking about the Carters, Clintons, Bushes and Obamas of the world. The fortunes of the many are determined by the powers of the few, or of the one. This is unnatural. There is nothing too big to fail - anyone with two eyes can see that. Even a one-eyed man can see that which is the point of having two.

There are several implications of this I should belabor for the moment. One is that this is an insight of Taleb. Two is that it augurs for open sourcing. Three that more people need to up their knowledge and skills so that the old recipe doesn't die with the old man. Four is that robustness is a component of military thinking in which you overspend in consideration of the worst case scenario which is catastrophic failure.

December 17, 2009

Every page I read further in Taleb (Black Swan) the first of many, the more I am drawn to his worldview personally. I flatter myself by saying that we think alike, but it is not surprising that within 20 pages he is talking about Eco and Borges - the guys I started reading 20 years ago. Like Taleb, I have always wanted to be a philosopher, and a particularly cranky greybeareded one at that. And like Taleb, I am likely to focus on personal libraries as a great tool. I myself am building what I hope amounts to my own newsroom, for a lack of a better term, a combination library, compute resource, newsroom, and intelligence station. A batcave. So while I appreciate Borges' Tlon, Uqbar Orbis Tertius, and all that... well let me not forswear too much of my intellectual youth.

Here's the dilemma. I've been working out some kind of way that I can figure out how to obtain the 'liberation quantity', aka 'fuck you money', which I am now calling Dosh. 1 Dosh, is the equivalent amount of money necessary such that you live freely without prostituting your brain - rather like I'm doing right now instead of programming, on my lunch break. It's rather like a molar solution, how much water you have to add depends upon your own atomic weight. My Dosh curve goes down as my needs approach zero and my age approaches my life expectancy. So I have a sort of do or die date about 7 years out. If I don't get the Dosh by the time I'm 55, I need to move to a smaller town and beat up on people I already outclass today.

Over at Taleb's website, he says don't ask him questions about finance. He browbeats the losers of the tribe of Black Scholes, et al. "Finance is for Philistines", sayeth the the mighty one. He's got a point, a philosophical one. Except he's making his point from the London School of Business. As he's already read 1000 books and made his Dosh point at least a decade or so ago, it leaves us on the short end wondering how long it is we have to suck up to the Philistines such that we might have time to fast for 40 days and purify ourselves far beyond the reaches of these philosophical wastelands called the fucking global economy.

In other words if true wisdom comes from knowing what it is you don't know, how much time does one have to spend working that angle in a world full of people who make money off of what it is they *do* know, or believe very strongly that they know? I'm all over this. I understand it implicitly because what I do every day is build systems that help people make rational decisions based upon what it is they know. And in the process of building these systems, I have come to know exactly how little one actually must know whilst making one's Dosh. Alas for me I am too far down the pike (or is that an excuse) of making knowledge explicit.

There are the exceptions - yet another reason I find harmony with Taleb. These are secrets and lies. These are purposeful ways of misdirecting people into making decisions based on false information and watching the consequences of their economies while they. Which is to say that somewhere, perhaps in the offices of Bernard Madoff, there are people who are hiding Black Swans from the public consciousness precisely because they don't want people to know such things exist. Obviously one can profit from the ignorance of others - you don't have to outrun the bear, just the slowest man in the hunting party. But as I mentioned in my interview, I admire priests and spies precisely because they can't generally profit from the knowledge they have. Secrets can be profitable only when kept, but then when shared with the market can cost the secret holder dearly. Secrets are 'anti-knowledge'. Lies are false knowledge. Taleb seems on the verge of creating a framework to help explain how these three types of knowledge determine risk.

But before the padawans of Master Taleb can apply these new skills in risk management, we have to get the Dosh. Now that finance is right out, what to do? I suppose I'll be reading more wonky stuff by Derman, et al, and continuing to reduce my needs to zero. Or, become a temporary philistine and backbite once the liberation quantity has been gotten. After all, when you're the author of the hottest serious meme on the planet, you get to (ahem) ply the trade of counter-intelligence, which you can use to beat up on people you outclass in that small town called Wall Street.

December 16, 2009

I went to my favorite brass rail last night in Cleveland. I happened to be sitting next to a table of suits in the investment banking biz. I overheard something obvious I'd never thought of.

Right now, money is free.

Bernanke is keeping short term interest rates effectively at zero. If you're a bank of a certain pedigree, or a financier with any wherewithal, these days are the greatest ever. Yesterday I wrote about Dow Chemical. Right now Dow is under 27. It is among one of the greatest companies in the world, and if you look at the history of its stock price you'll see that it has almost never been this low.

Now I was reading Taleb while eating my ribeye, and this dude gets better every day - I'm going to have to reach out to him. So I don't want to believe that there is no unknown risk. But think about it. The best companies in the world are undervalued in the stock market and money is free.

December 15, 2009

Now that I have a 500GB disk drive, I can bring more music to work. And since I get music from all of my friendly co-workers, I have a lot of music that I would not ordinarily hear or listen to. I find good stuff like that all the time, although I haven't recently. Well, I do like Mae, for that kind of mood.

Anyway, sometime today I came across an OutKast cut that I never knew, which includes about 95% of their music, having never bought hide nor hair. It was that Valentines day joint. Clever. It occured to me that there have been several eras of hiphop which might be categorized by the standout group. Right now, if my patent disregard for that subculture hasn't blinded me completely, I'd guess that this would now be the era of Kanye West which I would say started two years ago. Before West would be the era of 50 which was pretty short. basically ruled from OutKast. Before OutKast is kinda vague but it would definitely go back to about 2001 or so. Before OutKast is vague but I wouldn have to put Eminem in that space right after the age of Lauryn Hill & the Fugees which would be basically the spot after the death Biggie Smalls. So 1998 was the turning point, and I would say that the era of Biggie goes back to Nas & WuTang and then it gets complicated because back then, around 1994 I still cared.

Now I'm just throwing all this out there because I'd like to think of hiphop chronologcially. Every few years, there are some good artists to listen to whose stuff will still be playable ten years later, and more than just because of sentiment, I'll say.

Before 1994 when there was a big transition to Nas and the Wu, it was original Gangsta (call Nas and Biggie, neo-gangsta) there would be the era of Ice Cube and Dre. Basically the roots of the dramatic slow stuff that got how many movies into theaters? OK call it Cinematic Gangsta.

Before Cinematic Gangsta, say 1991 was the New Jack Swing which lived for a few short years going back to 1989 and before that was the era of Public Enemy. PE ruled in the days of Do the Right Thing,; funny how they had fallen off by X. Prior to that would be a four way era of Beastie Boys, EPMD, Kool Moe Dee and LL Cool Jay, and before that there was no industry to speak of, I don't care what people say about Big Daddy Kane.

According to my new hero John Nese, sugar is the largest agricultural crop on the planet. Bigger than corn and soybeans put together. But sugar is one of those things that certain Americans find it fashionable to badmouth.

A couple things here. I'm trying to get to understand a little about Canadian history. Since I started consuming the TVO videopodcasts, following my favorite intellectuals around, I've begun paying attention to that place. In flipping across one of those podcasts I heard somebody call the US the only true European nation left standing. It's true that Europe is no longer Europe. But also it turns out that France gave up Canada for Guadaloupe after the Seven Years War, and that's all I know about that. Guadaloupe was more important because of sugar. Not today of course, now it's all about Brazil and India, that is if you're interested in that dumb commodity that certain Americans find evil.

Well it figures that if you grow umpty-million tons of the stuff all around the world, there's got to be some moola in it. It turns out that there are some specific pesticides that works with the pests of sugarcane. One of them is called Lorsban. It is made by Dow Chemical and has been used since 1965 when they introduced it. And so here's the Wikipedia entry:

First registered in 1965 and marketed by Dow Chemical Company
under the tradenames Dursban and Lorsban, chlorpyrifos was a well known
home and garden insecticide, and at one time it was one of the most
widely used household pesticides in the US. Facing impending regulatory
action by the EPA, Dow agreed to withdraw registration of chlorpyrifos
for use in homes and other places where children could be exposed, and
severely restricted its use on crops. These changes took effect on Dec.
31, 2001.[4]
It is still widely used in agriculture, and Dow continues to market
Dursban for home use in developing countries. In India, Dow claims
Dursban is safe for people,[5] and its sales literature claimed Dursban has "an established record of safety regarding humans and pets."[6]

In 1995, Dow was fined $732,000 for not sending the EPA reports it
had received on 249 Dursban poisoning incidents, and in 2003, Dow
agreed to pay $2 million - the largest penalty ever in a pesticide case
- to the state of New York, in response to a lawsuit filed by the
Attorney General to end Dow's illegal advertising of Dursban as "safe".[7]

On July 31, 2007, a coalition of farmworker and advocacy groups
filed a lawsuit against the EPA seeking to end agricultural use of the
chlorpyrifos. The suit claims that the continued use of chlorpyrifos
poses an unnecessary risk to farmworkers and their families.[8]

In August 2007, Dow's Indian offices were raided by Indian
authorities for allegedly bribing officials to allow chlorpyrifos to be
sold in the country.[9]

In 2008, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) imposed 1000
ft buffer zones around salmon habitat to protect endangered salmon and
steelhead species. Aerial applications of chlorpyrifos will be
prohibited within these zones. [10]

Now when I read something like that second paragraph, I say to myself, well, that's nothing. And when I read the third paragraph I say oh brother here we go. The fourth and fifth just add to my disgust. Why? Because in the second paragraph I think - worldwide sugar production, 30 years, 249 incidents. Not 249 deaths, 249 poisoning incidents, on the whole planet.

Now for perspective I have this morbidity table in the back of my mind. If you bother to read it, you'll find that every year 5000 Americans die of food poisoning. Die. From food. That's an average of 5000 per year as compared to 8.3 per year on average from Dow's chemical.

December 14, 2009

According to the news on Bloomberg this morning. 14% of mortgage holders are not making payments and 25% of mortgages are underwater. Amazing. There is nothing in the White House payment modificationn plan to handle negative equity. Laurie Goodman is the expert on the spot.

A follow up to my Galco Saturday, I drank the Dandelion & Burdock soda. I'm at the age where I've tasted pretty much all of America and while I don't do eclectic just for the point of being eclectic, I do appreciate a surprise now and then. Surprises have been pretty few and far between, like the bouillabaisse at Sans Souci in downtown Cleveland and the nesi goreng at Straights in Palo Alto and the ribeye at Del Frisco's in Ft. Worth. To that, I'm going to add this soda. It is the greatest new beverage I have sampled since I learned of Bulleit bourbon in Philly three years ago.

I am in debt to the fine folks at Fentimans for their commitment to excellence.

The D&B is almost indescribable. It's very heady. It starts with a kind of herby ginger beer flavor, and then it twists in the middle into some very grownup aromatics and it ends with a flavor of juicy fruit gum. I kid you not, it is a remarkable drink.

I was already sold on their Curiosity Cola, head and shoulders above any other cola you can get, and now I can't wait to try their other flavors.

December 12, 2009

After I left NYC for the first time, I also left New World Afrikans. Now I have some reason to look again.

I have met an extraordinary man by chance. He is Rwandan filmmaker Leo Kalinda, whose prize winning film Mothers Courage, Thriving Survivors I am looking forward to viewing soon. It is as simple as that, and yet there is something I find again interesting that has dovetailed in my stream of recent ideas.

I am about to complete Assassin's Creed 2, a videogame that puts me in the shoes of a fictional character who interacts with prominent historical and fictional members of the Italian Reconnaissance, including daVinci and Medici. The story takes place in several cities of the period in the years just before 1500. Those cities include Forli, Venice and Florence. The protagonist, who is an assassin, is grown rather like most RPG characters and becomes a formidable warrior with extraordinary armor, and yet through various devices is required to blend in with the crowds in order to evade the conflict inevitable in the world of assassination. In the game I have become adept at murdering enemy guards on the Square of St. Marco and then hiding amongst the crowds of 15th century Italy. I imagine I'd have a rougher go at that in reality.

And yet these New World Afrikans, that diaspora of international and globetrotting men and women of my generation remain, scattered as we are. I have not been paying attention, not since 1994. It was odd then and odd now to expect some instant brotherhood with continental Africans and meeting with Kalinda reminded me that I have failed to hold out hope for enjoining any international business that goes to "The 54". Yet in fact I have sufficient roots and connections to make a go of it. So I am thinking about those habits I have cultivated over the years that gives me the confidence I have to consider myself amply qualified to perform in South America, Europe and Asia with the fact that I haven't much considered what I might do in Africa.

What I might certainly do is disappear in a different manner than I do in the midwest and in a different manner than I have ever done. And while I'm never self-conscious of my own conspicuousness - often being the sole black American of my rank in office buildings (dressed down as an IT guy), I often reflect on how different communities treat 'their blacks'. I recognize subtleties when I am the rare bird and challenges I might present. My answer is always humility, a lesson more recently learned, but more and more I would prefer anonymity.

My brother Doc, along with my track down Miller's Alley have provided two of the most important lessons I have tried to put to good use these past two years. Doc said, "Don't tell people what you're going to do. Do what you're going to do and then tell people what you did." I like that very much even though it augurs against my ever writing a cogent business plan and starting the sort of business I might.

Miller's Alley is a one way street home. He basically said don't spend a lot of time worrying about something that is completely beyond your ability to change. I'm the kind of person who needs to be whacked upside the head with this message, because I'm out there on the boulevard like a motherless child. I need to turn down Miller's Alley and head home where I make a difference. So do a lot of people.

It has been almost ten years since I've been out of the country. My French has lapsed into disuse, piqued only by the occasional phrase between myself and my son. I've forgotten the smattering of Mandarin that I learned and I don't really know what's out there. Yet I know my own business and profession well enough to be bored with it here when perhaps I could be gaining market share amongst the business class of Indians, Chinese and Africans on that continent.

A friend told me a few weeks, that somebody in her family died in Africa. She didn't say where, but that it held up our email correspondence for a couple weeks had me worried. My ties are existent but slim. I wonder what I would find if I sought to strengthen them. I am global enough and I could get to know certain African cities. I ought to think about that more.

December 11, 2009

Browsing David Goldman's blog about 22% underemployment I wondered about such an eventuality as 20% actual unemployment. At what point would supporters of a Welfare State actually start to behave like the investor class?

Any businessman knows that an increase in the entitlements of the welfare state undermines his business by making it easier on the unemployed and by raising taxes to pay for such programs. Conservatives regularly bark and scream about any tax increases as if the incremental bits will impoverish them permanently. But I think anyone can envision a scenario like the following:

I'm Joe Liberal and I have a commitment to a fair society. So I want to see Elroy Grabbag become a productive member of society. So I vote for welfare to get Elroy out of the gutter, and free health care for him to stay healthy. I don't mind paying more taxes. It's the price you pay for a fairer society.

Last year I made 75k and paid about 25% in taxes. Meaning I take home about 56k. Comfy. I look at Elroy and realize that with his welfare and free health care, he's getting for free what I have to pay for. Still, I take pride in my responsibility to my fellow man - I mean, through my taxes, it's not like I invite the guy over for dinner. But now that unemployment is 20% - there's more Elroys around the place. And they're all stuck just like me because there are no new jobs and no growth in the economy.

In fact, my local economy is doing lousy and we're knee deep in Elroys, but it's the Federal tax that's paying. So Sam Liberal in Georgia got a raise, and me, 10% of our company was laid off, meaning I have to do somebody else's job at work in addition to mine, and I'm lucky to have the job.

Well, crap. I'm not putting Elroy through college, but he's not becoming a productive member of society. He's just using my welfare and health care. I know it's not much, but I'd kinda rather have the extra dollars for my own family - because now I see how I could help my kids do better than I did. Like maybe get them to move to Georgia.

At some point, but probably only during a recession, does the idea take hold that there is no easy way to claw back the entitlements you gave up when life was easy and an incremental tax increase was not a problem. That should be especially evident now. Whether or not your party is responsible for the screwups in the economy which have resulted in the government being deeply in debt, you're going to have to pay for it. And the satisfaction one may get from seeing their socially responsible investments being managed by government programs will become tainted.

Furthermore, people ought to recognize that they cannot fight forever. You will one day turn your back on government and it will stab you. The reasonable thing to presume is that you are smarter and more possessed of integrity than the political proxies who would spend your dollars for you.

December 10, 2009

Every once in a while there is popular crap that I cannot avoid. And since I'm a bit bored with making comic strips, which I used to do with extraordinary snark, I've had to come up with a way to tell my readers that I don't care. So this is it.

I don't know who or what Lady GaGa is. Nor do I have any idea what is so interesting or not about some movie called 'Precious'. I cannot tell the difference between Luke and Owen Wilson.

I have this thing called Surchur. Well, everyone does. So I go to Surchur.com and find out what's going on this very minute. So I will see these things, and if somebody asks me about it during the course of a day, then I may formulate an opinion. Amanda Knox, for example is up on Surchur and I have no idea if this is or is not an important person.

If it gets to the point where it lasts a week or more then I'll probably do an Obligatory Seriousness. But sometimes I just say nothing because I'd just be flogging something stupid to death which is beneath what I ought to be about.

Oh yeah. And no I don't watch Glen Beck or any TV news and I haven't listened to Rush Limbaugh since Operation Chaos.

Holy smokes. Paglia sides with intelligent conservatives in the Culture Wars. And she's right. You simply must listen to this entire thing because it's something you've never heard an American atheist say.

I find it very interesting that at this particular moment that I'm starting into my review of the Arts. And her view of Architecture is rather like mine - I see it as something we still do well. Interesting that she goes back to the filmmaking of the post WW2 era to communicate her admiration for American art, though she does it to make one particular point about the artistry of religion rather than as the greatest exemplar of contemporary art. Or does she?

Wouldn't it be fun to know which of the 8500 banks in the US are strong and which are weak?

Imagine, if you will, that the stock price of all the banks that are publicly traded were out of sync with the way that bank examiners and senior executives of the bank actually rated their performance? Imagine that a bank that looks strong to the public, based upon publicly available information was in fact startlingly weak and that disclosure of the information to bank examiners was the only thing that kept consumers from making a run on that bank?

Well you don't have to imagine because it's already been imagined. Actually, it has been realized on a need-to-know basis. And guess who doesn't need to know? You, peasant!

But I'm helping you know, because there are other ways of knowing things by recognizing the actions of people who actually know.

Several academic studies have examined whether and to what extent private
supervisory information is useful in the supervisory monitoring of banks.
With respect to predicting bank failure, Barker and Holdsworth (1993)
find evidence that CAMEL ratings are useful, even after controlling for
a wide range of publicly available information about the condition and
performance of banks. Cole and Gunther (1998) examine a similar question
and find that although CAMEL ratings contain useful information, it decays
quickly. For the period between 1988 and 1992, they find that a statistical
model using publicly available financial data is a better indicator of
bank failure than CAMEL ratings that are more than two quarters old.

Hirtle and Lopez (1999) examine the usefulness of past CAMEL ratings
in assessing banks' current conditions. They find that, conditional on
current public information, the private supervisory information contained
in past CAMEL ratings provides further insight into bank current conditions,
as summarized by current CAMEL ratings. The authors find that, over the
period from 1989 to 1995, the private supervisory information gathered
during the last on-site exam remains useful with respect to the current
condition of a bank for up to 6 to 12 quarters (or 1.5 to 3 years). The
overall conclusion drawn from academic studies is that private supervisory
information, as summarized by CAMELS ratings, is clearly useful in the
supervisory monitoring of bank conditions.

Academics are people who know but have no money to put where their mouths are. I like the way that Taleb deals with them, but that's merely tangential here. My point is that CAMEL ratings exist and they would add clarity to our issues of ringfencing troubled banks, except that you and I cannot see them.

Last time I checked, I heard there was a shortage of bank examiners. Hmmm. I wonder how much that pays.

Chris Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics has sounded the alarm and I heard it. All this time we've been remarking about the incredible expansion of the Fed's balance sheet to several trillion, I didn't know that the way it was done was essentially illegal. It should have been done through the Treasury.

Now I seem to recall that there was much agreement that Paulson et al did not have the intellectual firepower of Bernanke and Geithner and so the Fed was doing what only it could do. But brainpower vs the law should result in the the law winning - especially at this level.

The proper way for the Fed, who also alone may have the purchasing power, was for them to purchase Treasury certificates and the strict set of instruments that they are allowed by law to purchase as issued by the Treasury. The Treasury would then have the dubious assets of the troubled banks on *their* books, not on the Federal Reserve's. It matters which way these things are financed.

The FRBNY not only used but abused the Fed's power's under Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act. In AIG, the FRBNY under Tim Geithner invoked the "unusual and exigent" clause again and again, but there is a serious legal question whether the then-FRBNY President and the FRBNY's board had the right to commit trillions without any due diligence process or deliberate, prior approval of the Fed Board in Washington, as required by law. The financial commitments to GS and other dealers regarding AIG were made always on a weekend with Geithner "negotiating" alone in New York, while Chairman Bernanke, Vice Chairman Donald Kohn and the rest of the BOG were sitting in DC without any real financial understanding of the substance of the transactions or the relationships between the people involved in the negotiations.

Was Tim Geithner technically qualified or legally empowered to "make deals' without the prior consent of the Fed Board? We don't think so. Shouldn't there have been financial fairness opinions re: the transactions? Yes.

We understand that the first order of business in any Fed audit sought by members of the Senate opposed to Chairman Bernanke's re-appointment is to review the internal Fed legal memoranda and FRBNY board minutes supporting the AIG bailout. These documents, if they exist at all, should be provided to the Senate before a vote on the Bernanke nomination. Indeed, if the panel established to review the AIG bailout and related events investigates the issue of how and when certain commitments were made by the FRBNY, we wouldn't be surprised if they find that Geithner acted illegally and that Bernanke and the Fed Board were negligent in not stopping this looting of the national patrimony by Geithner, acting as de facto agent for the largest dealer banks in New York and London.

December 09, 2009

1. As much as black people talk about black pride, why is the Black Nationalist Movement relegated to nothing more than a fringe movement.

Because there are three flavors of black nationalism right about now. The first and basically the only flavor that matters is black cultural nationalism. This is a soft kind of position that basically adheres to the idea that black culture is all that and Elvis was a vulture. You could think of the leader of the black cultural nationalists as Spike Lee. Cult-Nat types are basically interested in investing as much value, time and treasure into blackness, primarily out of love for blackness. It's all about the flavor and being immersed in it. All the cult nationalists range from your basic India Irie to the edge of hard afrocentrists. Any black dude who wears dreads is one of them unless he does it strictly for the chicks, including white chicks.

The second flavor of black nationalist is the separatist. Your Nation of Islam, New Black Panther types. The survivalists. The ones who rents Rosewood more than once. These types don't last long in the daylight, but you'll find them in most every black neighborhood. They'd never live anywhere but black neighborhoods. Sometimes they masquerade as Muslims, got to give the black power handshake, calls blackfolks Kings and Queens, thinks that Neely Fuller and Cress-Welsing are deep thinkers. Rarely do they keep their 'slave' names. Separatists aren't always militant, but they're almost always racist. As soon as you hear one say, "black people can't be racist", you know you've got a live one. Ask them about Tawana Brawley or Nat Turner... and bring a lunch.

The third flavor is a kind of black nationalist is the kind of neo-nationalist. They will simply say they are 'merely' pro-black, but they are exclusively pro-black, specifically about recycling black dollars. What they want most is black power for black people with black money, because by and large they are convinced that the world works in an ethnic mercantilist way. These are a class of bounders beholden to no tradition who will call themselves 'nouveau niggers' because they really have no other idea of what a black man with some power and money is like. They think that they are more reality based than the others, but they're playing an ahistorical game too.

All black nationalists think that racial integration is an iffy proposition. They will always prefer Malcolm X to MLK, and with some exceptions on the neo- side, always prefer Karl Marx to Adam Smith. They will sing the praises of black unity and are generally pissed that 'we cant get our thing together like the Jews' or whomever. What binds all black nationalists together is a sense of shame they feel for the race for which something MUST be done. And then you listen to their plan..

2. To your knowledge, has their philosophy ever been tested (i.e. its followers win government office and successfully implemented any of its tenants)

Yes. It's a smashing success in black history departments all over America, and nowhere in Africa or anywhere else. Every black nationalist with any organizational dollars can be traced to one degree of separation from a black bookstore, black studies curriculum, or black media outlet. They all have to stay plugged into the continual intemolectual spew otherwise reality would knock some sense into their collectivist theories. But outside of that same old mau-mau game, nobody is making any money being a black nationalist outside of the Nation of Islam, and the chitlin circuit that collects speaker fees from gullible undergrads.

3. If not, would not cities such as Detroit and New Orleans provide a platform for their philosophy? Why haven’t they taken the lead on rebuilding these cities?

Because the political end of black nationalism is a dead end. Whether black political activists with a nationalist bent like it or not, white liberal Democrats have no patience for all that bullshit. Not that white liberal Democrats are not full of it themselves, but they know how to run political campaigns and control votes and dollars, and without them black nationalists have no organization, no infrastructure, no say. Hell, black nationalists don't even have a list of names of black nationalists.

That doesn't mean that black nationalist sentiments of the cultural, separatist and neo- strain don't matter in political contests and rhetoric. They do. Black nationalist words speak much louder than black nationalist actions, and those words count, and they appeal to African Americans on the fence - like memes of Obama getting shot. Or in defense of Mumia and Tookie. Or hateration against Obama as 'half-black'. But none of that influence is permanent. In the end, there is NO black nationalist organization of substance in America, meaning with money in the bank. (as compared to say... Ebony and Jet, or Sucka Free Sunday) http://www.mtv.com/shows/sucker_free/series.jhtml

The most important thing to understand about Black Nationalism is that it has always battled with Christianity in general and the Black Church in particular. And it has always lost. That's really all you need to know.

4. It is my theory that the Black Nationalist Movement is best left to those who live in their momma’s basement and quote Prof. George James to hide the fact that they just don’t want to work.

Oh plenty of them work, and they work hard. It's just that the work that they work doesn't work.

December 07, 2009

What a surprise it is to find in Taleb the ends of certain of my thoughts. On the plane over here to snowy Cleveland I had a couple brainstorms. Here is the killer question that occupies me for the moment.

Wait.

First of all, let me give you Taleb's take on religion which is squarely in line with mine. He asserts that religious people deal better with incomplete information. And he also suggests that those who are normalized by non-religious rationality tend to be overconfident. I think his term is 'empistemic arrogance' which is squarely Conservative as in Oakeshott.

So the question that popped into my head some 36,000 feet over the midwestern US was "What is sufficiently divine?" As soon as I thought it, Martin Amis' 'The Janitor on Mars' came to mind. There is much I do not recall about the story and will not do it justice in my brief description, but the salient bits are as follows.

A robot lives several dozen miles beneath the surface of Mars and comes to the surface to speak to Earth. The Martians who built that robot were essentially wiped out in a war with an advanced civilization from beyond the Solar System hundreds of millions of years ago. Earth itself was considered a backwater, rather like the growth on a discarded sandwich, and in all of human evolution it has not developed to the level of intelligence of this robot, which is itself only a planet janitor. The janitor is surly and dismissive of human science and technology and answers all of the great scientific mysteries in his boredom, but to no avail because Earth is doomed to be destroyed as part of some bargain made by the loss of Mars millions of years before. There is nothing the human race can do in its appeal to this robot to secure its survival - the robot is merely following the orders of its creator, who themselves were destroyed by an even greater civilization.

Is such a robot sufficiently divine to be considered God? If it can singlehandedly save the Earth from destruction or destroy it, what obligation would humanity have to figure out how to get it to be merciful? If the robot promised to build a warp-drive transport that would take a continent's fill of human scum to some other bog in the heavens, how many virgins would you sacrifice?

The point of this argument is that it is only rational to consider the destruction of mankind to determine mankind's moral obligation to itself. The ultimate value of life and meaning on Earth is best determined in light of such thought experiments. I think that Taleb would argue that this is what religion has been doing, or attempting to do since its invention.

In that respect, it is a fair suggestion to say that man is the only creature that thinks about God and then consequently re-evaluates the meaning of his own life. It doesn't matter whether that God is 'God' or a robot janitor on Mars which is only some idiot fraction of the powers that be in our own galaxy. It matters that it is sufficiently divine such that in contemplation of it's powers and intentions we must consider the fate of our species.

Next time somebody tells you global warming isn't a religion, you have a new answer.

That irresistible dig is not my point however. My point is that intelligent people are making incredible excuses and evading that which established religion is in order to create yet another religion in the guise of not-religion. They are hamstrung by the fact that their god must be provable. They are trying to invent something non-divine which will justify their frameworks as proper for estimating the mankind's moral obligation to itself.

The best thing about Galco's is that getting home and opening up the sodas is not anti-climatic. In case you've been under a rock (which is often a good place to be when it's raining Tiger Woods stories), you should know about Galco's Soda Pop Shop. I was made aware a couple weeks ago, and now I hear there's an NPR story. Today there was even a book signing. First to the video that hipped me to the deal.

When I found that this guy and his joint were just 15 miles away from my house, I knew that I'd be making several trips. And so this weekend was the first.

First thing was that I had to herd the cats of my family which is getting more difficult to do by the day. We managed to get everyone together by 11am from sleepovers and sleepins and take the Pasadena freeway up to North Figeuroa into Highland Park. We made a quick stop at BofA and then turned left on York and headed to Avenue 54. That's because the Estrella Taco Truck is there. Yes a taco truck. The al pastor burrito (no guac, no sour cream) is a perfect balance. Just spicy meat held together in a perfect tortilla with the right amount of sauce, onion, & cilantro. You know there are still Americans who don't know what cilantro is. I know, hard to believe.

We wheeled back down York and pulled into Galco's. A bunch of dudes were hanging out in front eating and drinking sodas. In a glance I could tell they were either YouTubers or Oxy students. But it was the second incongruous group I'd seen in this East LA style 'hood. My family of course was the first.

Inside it is as bright and cheerful as in the color drenched video. Except the florescents weren't giving the color balance you saw in the video. But the excitement of seeing candy and soda from long lost memory was just as extraordinary as you would expect. The proprietor was there, and a bunch of employees were busily restocking shelves and pointing folks in interesting directions. The photographer took a shine to my kids. I grabbed a cart and went at it.

It took me a while to figure out what Nese, the owner, was on about when he talked about CRV and the monopolization of recycling by Coke and Pepsi. But by the time I got in the store I had figured it out. As soon as I saw a bottle of BubbleUp I remembered that I used to put them in my wagon and return them to Boys Market on Crenshaw for a few pennies each. It was the market that paid me the money and got me back in the store. They sent the bottles back to the bottler who washed them and reused them. Well the accounting geniuses at Coke and Pepsi realized that if they could get a good enough deal on recycled glass, it would be cheaper for them to make new bottles than to wash and relabel the old ones, especially as you realize many of the bottles were painted. So they argued for the support of CRV and that took their rewashing factories out of the supply chain. And it took the markets out too. So now the states run the CRV programs and they get the kickback from the bottlers, not the markets. You can argue that it's just a penny or two per bottle, but those pennies add up, and none of them go to the Galcos of the world.

But going to Galco's is not about sour grapes. It's about Nugrape and Big Red and Faygo Rock&Rye and Kackapoo Joy Juice and all those old brands you thought were gone. It's about crazy flavors you never knew existed much less made into a soda. I can't even imagine a Dandelion and Burdock soda, but there it is right at eye level on the shelf.

Moreover Galco's is about experiencing the kind of long tail personal retail that is a very rare thing in this country. There's a man running that store who reminds us that quality doesn't necessarily mean rarified and overpriced. Some of my favorite business success stories are about the man who didn't do a lot of market research or focus groups on a product, but instead assumed that the customer shared his own passion. Those guys don't often make the big time, but they make the 99th percentile because they can control the details.

You wouldn't think that there are details in soda, but there absolutely are. In fact, soda is exciting again. We've all been dumbed down with the mass market sodas, because as soon as you open the top on one of these rare brands you smell it. When is the last time you appreciated the smell of a soda before you chugged it down? I'm telling you it's a new experience. Not just shopping for the stuff, which is a delight in itself, but actually drinking it down.

My new favorite soda is Curiosity Cola. It's an astonishing drink. If you've ever had an IBC or a Jones, then you know how different a good soda can be from the mainstream brands. In my book the Fentimans are up a significant notch from them. I tried it with some Captain Morgan and it's an entirely new drink. Can't wait to taste it with Jack. Next I am dying to make a cucumber martini.

Now it's just like me to become a soda snob, but instead I have this wave of sadness in the realization of how we've all been ripped off and deprived of one of life's simple pleasures. It ought to be a no-brainer to go to the store and marvel at what kinds of goods are available after the culmination of thousands of years of beverage making. But we've just been swallowing swill. Galco's selection (and they're supplying restaurants too) is waking us up to something marvelous and oh so sweet. Tell your favorite bartender to get on board.

Americans should do well to remember Wimpy, the hamburger scarfing cadge from the Popeye cartoon. No matter what day it was, Wimpy would always be asking for money for a hamburger for which he would gladly repay you on next Tuesday. Except that he never did. Something Popeye did would always come up distracting him from the collection, and Wimpy would grow fatter and wiser. No matter how much spinach he ate, Popeye never got his money back from Wimpy.

It turns out that Popeye is like most human beings when it comes to envisioning next Tuesday. According to the Long Now Blog a neuroscientist has shown that we don't pay much attention to consequences of the far future.

..the further an event lies in the future, the less people care about
it. So if offered $100 now or $500 18 months from now, many people
still take the $100. The consequence is that there’s little difference
between President Obama promising 18 months from now versus 18 years
from now. In the human ken, both are obscured in the mists of the
distant future.

Maybe this is why it pays to punish your kids now instead of, 'next time for sure'. But it also reminded me of what I just read in Gladwell's new collection of old essays. It might be that Gladwell was the one who introduced us to Taleb. I never heard about him much before he published his Black Swan book when I started listening to Bloomberg about 18 months ago. But Gladwell wrote about his contrarianess in 2002.

Taleb's 'Emperica' investment strategy is brilliant by my reckoning, primarily because it so much resembles gambling. I hate gambling but I am illogical about it. I love investing but I'm illogical about it. Investing, according to popular wisdom means collecting interest on capital, and this is how fund managers present their products to the investing public. How do you make a small fortune? Start off with a large one. Let your money work for you by parking it away and letting it gain interest. All passive voice kind of stuff organized around a mental model in our minds that's very comforting. So we expect that a successful portfolio (but let's not deconstruct 'balanced portfolio' just yet) will give us some reasonable return in steady increments over time. That's what we grok to be a 'sound investment'. That a stock investment should produce 'revenues' like a growing business, in even predictable measures along a fairly narrow confidence interval. We like the sound of stuff like 2% per year.

Empirica turns that on its head by using hedges that normally lose money during normal times but pay off wildly during unpredictably chaotic times. In other words, Empirica plays longshots. Not just longshot winners but longshot events. Except it does so without doubling down. So you just pay to play what amounts to something that pays off like a life insurance policy on somebody else's life.

You just might have to wait until next Tuesday to get your moola. We don't like the sound of that.. Maybe you get 300% in four to seven years, but on average you lose money every day.

I like that kind of investment vehicle. Especially when I hear people who sound like they get paid to sound like they know what they're talking about tell audiences that recovery is just around the corner.

What I've just discovered is that Taleb digs Oakeshott. Actually, the way Taleb put it, Oakeshott is an intellectual hero of his. That's what kind of Conservative I am people. Just in case you missed it. Epistemological Modesty.

December 06, 2009

A couple notes. Taleb mentions the Zingales plan debt to equity swap for unforclosed homeowners and all the wrong things Obama is doing having effectively reversed the rewards of capitalism.
Again this is perfectly sensible and yet we were right about why Zingales' plan has not materialized. There are no incentives for Congress and the crew in Washington to do the right thing. Amazing.

December 05, 2009

This question is tangential to an N-Word conversation that never ceases, and since I recorded a YouTube on it a few years back, I'm somewhat bound to answer recurrent questions. Part of my answer, then as now, is why would you follow the sub-culture of disreputable people? I mean if Elvis stole and 'white' people loved a thief, how upset can you get about that popularity? Obviously some people want to make a point about living in Babylon - the whole country's a sty, yeah we've heard that before. Except that there in fact was a civil war and blacks didn't, by and large, have to participate in their own violent manumission. In other words, there's always a better 'white' sub-culture. There's always a bigger fish and Cobb's Rule #4: Civilization is where you put it.

Bottom line, why get mad? If you hate the people who love Elvis, then love the people who love The Beatles or Hendrix or Muddy Waters or Beethoven or Miriam Makeba. Just don't be lumping them all together. Get in where you fit in.

There's another line from another song that I find more appropriate as the days go by. What a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away. And this is what goes through my head whenever I hear people hating on Elvis. He was only a hero to the people you hate the most, not most people.

This film is so unbelievably awful that I'm glad I stole it. Well, I didn't exactly steal it. I got it for free from a friend who ripped it. I don't know how he ripped it, but I'm glad as hell he did the normal version rather than the sort where various people involved in making the film blab over it. Which reminds me to tell you that 'A Scanner Darkly' is complete hooey as a film and if it had any chance of being anything beyond the book, that chance has been ruined by Dick's daughter telling me about some character her father lived with who thought he was crawling with bugs, and thus 10 minutes of film leaves me permanently disgusted.

That's about all the time I took with Sarah Marshall because in a fraction of that I could see that the reason she left naked boy had something to do with the complete ass who was kissing people in the airport in order to 'do something' about global warming.

I am disconnected to the Christian who wants to show pity on the poor misguided freaks who are the subject and object of this excrescence. Sorry, you'll just have to take your case directly to the saints. As for me, I'm not having it. And if the flick is rated < R, I hope I can show enough of it to my children to disgust them as well. Or maybe not. No. Wrong. You don't send your son to a whore to show him what not to do. You say, trust me, you don't want to subject your immortal soul to that sort of radioactivity. It won't kill you straight out but the cell damage is real.

Attention all devout Muslims in defense of Hasan, I understand exactly where you think you're coming from. If I believed that American men were like this asshat, I'd want to shoot them up too. I'd sign up to exterminate the kind of cretin who lays a woman in a one night stand and then immediately bursts into tears thinking about playing Dance Dance Revolution with his former babe. If this was the substance of American culture, I'd out takfir you, Abu. But let me help you understand something, and even abet your cause. Credits. At the end of every American movie are the names of the people responsible, and if you watch enough of them, and you have the appropriate software, you can trim down your lists to an appreciable dimension. They are still Them, and most people want Them put away.

Fortunately for all of us, Them are particularly sensitive to the blistering heat of righteous criticism, which I am exercising here. There's no need for explosives, a finely place excoriation will suffice. And really, I've already wasted too much time thinking about it.

I'm looking for a new wallpaper for my windows desktop. I ambled across a Picaso and then went to Guernica. It reminded me that my cousin had a very large print on his wall in Brooklyn, and I suppose that says a bit about my cousin and my family. I doubt that he still has it in Madison where he's raising his family. But it also reminded me that I would be remiss in my review of Western Civilization, that thing our Improper Empire is involved in defending against errant Islamists and other enemies of liberty, if I were not to consider our arts at length.

We already know that popular film and music are degraded, music much more than film but film nonetheless. I can't imagine that there has been a significant and serious play on Broadway since Angels in America, although I didn't even bother to see that. People die of disease. So what? But we are geniuses when it comes to graphic art and architecture. The 'design' area of Western Civ is alive and kicking, and fewer places more innovative than videogames despite their mostly awful cultural content. Movies can be visually arresting, and I tend to watch them for that quality as well as their mix of storytelling through the medium though again, most of the stories are awful. (Remind me to compare and contrast 'Gran Torino' with 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall').

So I'm thinking back to Picaso and his peers, and fortunately, there is a top 200 poll that I have found at the Telegraph. I figure I'll go through it. I do so in parallel to my good virtual friend Gerard over at American Digest as an effort to find Something Wonderful over here.

One of the very first CD-ROMs I ever bought, back when they called them CD-ROMs was a collection of several hundred paintings complete with text and audio narrations on their significance. I wore that sucker down, and I wonder where it is. But there were some extraordinary images from around the world and my favorites remain clear in my mind's eye without any particular attribution.

Today it is not completely ironically, a videogame by the name of Assassin's Creed II that impels me to jump into a little online art collection, appreciation and criticism. As part of one of that game's side quests, collecting art for one's villa is included. So I must travel to Forli, Venezia and Firenze to pick up bargains. I recognized a few of the paintings and so it piqued my curiosity. What must there be on Google artwise? Well, quite a bit.

Back in 1986 when Xerox bet one of its farms on VAX technology, we used to wonder if anybody on the planet would scan documents at higher resolutions than 600dpi. It seemed, at the time, to be out of the question. And so Eeyore and his doubtful cousins ran the day about matters of online art appreciation saying it'll never happen. At this moment in Moore's Law's run (amok it seems) isn't it odd that as GE is in the process of selling NBC to Comcast what those megalomaniacs have in mind is piping more crap like Iron Man in HD? Now I enjoy watching metal monsters spit fire at Muhajadeen as much as the next barbarian, but there's a limit. And of late I am becoming fond of mocking those who capitalize on the tastes of peasants and then later pretend that they are too big to fail. So right about now I think it most appropriate to consider what efforts there are to retain and represent some of mankind's better visual creations onto the Internet, the second greatest creation of the 20th century (behind all that's nuke).

Next year I'm going to get back into the market. It has been about 9 years since I dabbled. I had a nice little pile back then and I did will with a conservative portfolio through the times of irrational exuberance, like everybody else. Except I was very skeptical as I learned about the different classes of investors and came to understand what professional traders know that day traders do not. There are indeed some rigs in the game. All that said, I've put away some money and it's time to make it work. And I'm not going to be so edgy that I need to beat 4 percent.

So I started looking at ETFs and I found RSX. No it's not a Mazda, it's a Russian fund, and it's doing damned well. I sent that googled page over to my brother Doc who is carping about unemployment. And an old idea creeped into my head. Capitalism doesn't die just because the man running the government is a socialist.

It would seem that by definition, anyone dumb enough to be a socialist is less intelligent than Adam Smith. I exaggerate socialist stupidity, but Adam Smith understood something about the greed of men, socialists only understand the greed of businessmen. Limiting the greed of businessmen but giving everything by law over to the appetites of the masses is indeed a formula for self-destruction. This is why command economies that survive restrain the masses to an extraordinary degree. It doesn't auger very well for those who start in the peasantry but are clever enough to figure out how merchants make money. Where's the incentive for them to learn? Where's the law that protects them as they do?

Just imagine the scenario. The great leader says "Who want's to make more money than the average prole?" Mee!" The hands fly up by the millions. "OK", he says. "I'm going to pass legislation to get a program started that will get you the government pass you will need to be a part of the production for the people." Yeah, right behind the cousins of everybody who's writing the legislation. The lottery is held and a new protected class is created, just like that. Free men don't wait for government legislation and business programs to figure out how to make money with their fellow men. They scheme about it over a beer at the local pub or turn their living room into a smoke filled room or sit up late nights in the dorm or walk into Mr. Peterson's corner store and ask for work. They read the Wall Street Journal or Motley Fool. They even try out for game shows. There are a million ways to make a buck and those dreams and schemes never stop percolating. Cigarettes trade in prison, sandwiches trade on the schoolyard. Every man is a market, you merely need to find his price.

Governments will always have some role in setting rules and regulating markets. But markets are between and among men and have always been because it is our nature to trade selfishly to eventual mutual benefit. Some men are clever traders and others are fools, but they are motivated by the same thing - their very nature as human beings. That never changes no matter what the balance of power. Capitalism dies when the human spirit dies. Anybody want to take a wager on when that happens?